A transition from an author’s book to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur, and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke.–Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, no. 14 (Saturday, May 5, 1750)

How to accomplish it? I don’t know. Perhaps population exchanges or year-abroad programs between blue and red states. Perhaps the Nation should offer free subscriptions to registered Republicans. Perhaps Katha Pollitt and Ann Coulter (or Thomas Frank and David Brooks, or Greg Palast and Matt Drudge) should barnstorm the country, the way Stanley Fish and Dinesh D’Souza did a few years ago. Perhaps all secular liberals should sign a pledge: every time one evangelical reads a non-religious book, one of us will go to church. Somehow or other, someone or other must sow a healthy appetite for informed, discriminating political argument across large swaths of the electorate where it now appears lacking. Otherwise, public life will become wholly (what it now is largely) a marketing competition, and nothing more.

Can Barack Obama make Americans eat their political broccoli? He’s certainly gotten a lot of them to read, or at least buy, The Audacity of Hope. He seems to have struck a spark with granitic New Hampshirites recently; and Beltway reporter-chatterers are charmed – for now. His first book, Dreams from My Father, was a genuine achievement. Growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia; on the street in Chicago, organizing; visiting Kenya in search of his father and clan: it’s a colorful background and he made, if not the most of it, then quite a bit. Samuel Johnson famously pronounced: “A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” Ditto for a politician’s writing prose. Dreams had a fine loose rhythm and a nice way with dialogue. There were touches of staginess, corniness, didacticism, but the author was clearly a mensch and even, in a few passages, an artist.

The Audacity of Hope has touches of passion and vividness, but on the whole, it’s a campaign document – a very, very good stump speech. Not broccoli but granola; i.e., fairly nourishing but with too much sugar. Lots of anecdotes, hardly any figures, many ringing but always carefully qualified statements of position. Just about all of them are reasonable, progressive positions. America will be very lucky if they’re enacted into policy.

But he’s no giant. In intellectual and moral stature, he comes just about up to Ralph Nader’s or Barbara Ehrenreich’s knee, or to Russ Feingold’s or Barney Frank’s navel. Nevertheless, he’s probably the most intelligent, honest, and idealistic of the Democratic presidential candidates.

So what? The quality of leaders matters less than the quality of citizens. President Obama, like any other, will operate within constraints dictated by the balance of forces surrounding him, the sum of pressures brought to bear on him. For progressives, the goal should be to affect that balance, to contribute to that sum. Writing in the Nation last June, David Sirota observed: “Obama is all about the art of the possible within the system.” What’s possible is up to us. The main lesson of the right-wing ascendancy is: the bastards never give up; or as Yeats put it, rather more elegantly: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” The best had better get – and stay – off their asses.

Plato put it best in the Republic: “A people gets the leaders it deserves.” Don’t like the way things are going in your country? Shut up about it and do something different. Practice thrift. Read a book. Have a serious conversation. Be better.

Now that’s advice you’ll never hear from the chattering classes. Or to quote Thoreau apposite this very question: “Read not the times. Read the eternities.” It’s not as though my teaching is likely to start a reading revolution, but what the fuck, I’ve tilted at less exciting windmills.